NAS Parallel Benchmarks

The NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) are a small set of programs designed to help evaluate the performance of parallel supercomputers. The NPB 1 benchmarks are derived from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applications and consist of five kernels and three pseudo-applications. Problem sizes in NPB are predefined and indicated as different classes. Reference implementations of NPB are available in commonly-used programming models like MPI and OpenMP.

Building the Benchmarks

1. Download and unpack the NPB source code from nas.nasa.gov:

   wget https://www.nas.nasa.gov/assets/npb/NPB3.4.2.tar.gz
   tar xvzf NPB3.4.2.tar.gz
   cd NPB3.4.2/NPB3.4-OMP
   

2. Create the make.def file to configure the build for NVIDIA HPC compilers:

   cat > config/make.def <<'EOF'
   FC = nvfortran
   FLINK = $(FC)
   F_LIB =
   F_INC =
   FFLAGS = -O3 -mp
   FLINKFLAGS = $(FFLAGS)
   CC = nvc
   CLINK = $(CC)
   C_LIB = -lm
   C_INC =
   CFLAGS = -O3 -mp
   CLINKFLAGS = $(CFLAGS)
   UCC = gcc
   BINDIR = ../bin
   RAND = randi8
   WTIME  = wtime.c
   EOF
   

3. Create the suite.def file to build all benchmarks with the D problem size:

   cat > config/suite.def <<'EOF'
   bt	D
   cg	D
   ep	D
   lu	D
   mg	D
   sp	D
   ua	D
   EOF
   

4. Compile all benchmarks:

   make -j suite
   

A successful compilation will generate these binaries in the bin/ directory:

$ ls bin/
bt.D.x  cg.D.x  ep.D.x  ft.D.x  lu.D.x  mg.D.x  sp.D.x  ua.D.x

Running the Benchmarks

Run each benchmark individually using the command shown below. In the command, replace ${BENCHMARK} with the benchmark name, for example cg.D.x, and replace ${THREADS} and ${FLAGS} with the appropriate values from the reference results shown above.

OMP_NUM_THREADS=${THREADS} OMP_PROC_BIND=close numactl ${FLAGS} ./bin/${BENCHMARK}

Reference Results

Grace CPU Superchip, 480GB Memory Capacity

Use this script to run all the benchmarks on 72 cores of the Grace CPU:

#!/bin/bash
for BENCHMARK in bt cg ep lu mg sp ua ; do
    OMP_NUM_THREADS=72 OMP_PROC_BIND=close numactl -m0 ./bin/${BENCHMARK}.D.x
done

Performance is reported on the line marked “Mops / total”. The expected performance is shown below.